A zBrush hair Render test.
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zbrush Gibson Girl hair test
Videos
Its been a while since I’ve posted any animation. Sat down the other day, opened up TVPaint and then just started drawing. No game plan. I had a loose idea in my head and just improved this straight ahead animation.
I forgot how much fun it is to animate water. To clarify the action I added a quick tint pass so you can better see the elements.
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Hong Kong iPad Commercial
Saw my painting on TV today while watching the Olympics here in Hong Kong :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MFrJxUmKHE
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My goofy Mug
Here is the final render of my ZBrush Self Portrait sculpt. I created the sculpt entirely in ZBrush primarily using Dynamesh and Fibermesh techniques.
While making the model I stumbled upon the ZBrush retopology tools and spent a few nights learning how to implement them on my goofy mug. The retopolgy tools are a little clumsy but I found with time and effort that they were able to get the job done. Fibermesh can be a real memory drain so this new resource is a godsend for my little laptop. Now that I have a retopology option I am able to subdivide my models in a much more efficient way and increase the resolution I am able to work at significantly. I feel like a fool for not figuring out this function earlier.
I love dynamesh, don’t get me wrong, but it can be difficult to work with on the back-end, especially after you have found your character. The high polycounts cause lots of memory crashes which up your chances of lost work and make computational heavy actions like transposes nearly impossible. But the real killer and the reason I began researching retopology options is the lack of UV’s . You create these beautiful characters but can’t do anything with them outside of ZBrush. The lack of UVs was a big problem for me on some of my previous sculpts especially when I was trying to render glass. At the time I wanted to render in MentalRay but couldn’t get any of my color information over to maya. Now I can do this easily so I couldn’t be happier.
My other big experiment this time around was using a morph target to sculpt the hair. My previous Fibermesh hair attempts all involved raw extrusions which I would sculpt using the move elastic brush to the desired styling. This time though I sculpted a guide model, ie morph target, and grew the hair to fill in the difference. This worked rather brilliantly and i’m pleased with the results. The one small catch is that my final hair has some unknown error which has block all attempts at exporting and transposing. I will have to rebuild it at some future date if I ever want to animate this fellow.
Topology
For those who are interested into this sort of thing. Here is the topology and a few hi-res renders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXioL_Gk5k&hd=1
Detail Renders
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Long live the King
So here is the final render of “the King”. He was created entirely in zBrush and took about a weeks worth of late night sculpting sessions to complete. In case you have been out of the loop on this guy. He is a character I designed for the movie Space Chimps in collaboration with Dean Taylor and the rest of the art team while working on the film Space Chimps. Our designs were cut but I resurrected him here to appease my own curiosity.
Render Pains
It was a fun project but took more time than I was expecting as I ran into a bit of trouble towards the end. I like the sculpt but I must admit that I am disappointed with the render. I had all sorts of technical issues and have decided to call it quits.
The rendering of the king himself is ok, but the little Luzian aliens are not properly rendered. Their material is all wrong and should actually look like blown glass. Wouldn’t you know, one of the shortfalls of zBrush is that it can’t render caustics, so no glass. The best it can manage is a sudu-transparent material. It also turns out, you can’t have a transparent object behind another transparent object, to fake glass, as the first object will completely matte out the later. I didn’t know this when I began or else I would have changed my workflow to be able to render in MentalRay. Since I used dynamesh on all the characters they lack UV’s and have insanely high poly counts so Rendering in Maya was out of the question. So in the end rather than glass-like aliens I get waxy, oily looking ones. Sigh. Que Sera, Sera.
Still, render issues aside, everything looks ok and I am happy. I have my closure now and can move on to other things. I learned alot from this project and am glad I did it.
The Making of the king
Here are a few work in progress pictures.
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Zbrush Sculpt: Return of the King – rough
This is a rough zbrush sculpt of the king I designed for Space Chimps. He was cut but I resurrected him here to appease my curiosity. Its been a long time since that project but I have been dying to know what my designs would have looked like in 3D. Now he’s still a work in progress but I wanted to share him because I’ve got a lot on my desk at the moment and it may be a while before I can finnish him.
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Alien Tree Zbrush Sculpt
This is from earlier in the week but I never had the time to post it. It’s a A quick tree sculpt I made in ZBrush. The base of the tree was made using zsphears and dynamesh but all the branches, leaves and grass were made with FiberMesh.
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Zombie John
Apparently I forgot to post this Zbrush zombie sculpt. I made this fellow back around Halloween and has been sitting here in draft form for a few months. Its a tad out of season now but I guess late is better than never.
This was my first ZBrush 42Rb DynaMesh expirament. It was also my first use of the render filters function. Its a quick sculpt that dragged out into a few hours after I started playing around with the rendering features.
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Scruffy looking ZBrush FiberMesh Sculpt
I couldn’t sleep last night so I jumped on Zbrush and made this lazy looking bum. I’m still amazed and how quickly you can make interesting looking objects in ZBrush. Something like this would have taken me a month a few years ago and now I can make it in under three hours.
For the record: This is a quick sculpt I made in ZBrush using DynaMesh for the face and Fibermesh for all of the hair elements as well as the robe. It was made using Zbrush 4R2b.
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Hong Kong Harbor Time-lapse
You don’t really realize how busy Hong Kong Harbor is until you make a time-lapse film of all the traffic. Wow there are a lot of boats moving through there. It’s almost hypnotic. I particularly like watching the ferry’s rip in and out of the terminal building.
I managed to shoot this fun time-lapse film on New Years Eve with my iPhone and the iMotion HD App.